November 12, 2009

It’s not an isolated case. The connections and vested interest in pharmaceuticals is widespread: in the media, government, science, advisory and regulatory bodies, academia…even consumer advocacy groups. When you start finding the connections and joining the dots you stop trusting the spin.

November 1, 2009

French philosopher, Olivier Clerc has produced a fascinating book about how beliefs influence medical dogmas and practices. He explains how modern medicine has taken on the characteristics of Christianity.

Medicine, then, has become the new world religion. The specific myths, beliefs, and rites of Christianity have been unconsciously projected into medicine since Pasteur. As I explain in detail in the next chapters, we can establish very close parallels between Christianity and modern medicine. In brief:

physicians have taken the place of priests;

vaccination plays the same initiatory role as baptism, and is accompanied by the same threats and fears;

the search for health has replaced the quest for salvation;

the fight against disease has replaced the fight against sin;

eradication of viruses has taken the place of exorcising demons;

the hope of physical immortality (cloning, genetic engineering) has been substituted for the hope of eternal life;

pills have replaced hosts;

donations to cancer research take precedence over donations to the Church;

a hypothetical universal vaccine could save humanity from all its illnesses, as the Savior has saved the world from all its sins;

the medical power has become the government’s ally, as was the Catholic Church in the past;

“charlatans” are persecuted today as “heretics” were yesterday, and dogmatism rules out promising alternative medical theories;

the same absence of individual responsibility is now found in medicine, as previously in the Christian religion;

patients are alienated from their bodies, as sinners used to be from their souls.

He explains how, driven by our fears, we create a belief system and then rationalise those beliefs:

“…fears found in the depths of our consciousness, which remain the hidden determining factors for most of our actions. These fundamental fears — fear of death, mostly, but also fear of evil, fear of suffering, fear of separation, fear of solitude — have led humanity, at all times throughout history, to make up all kinds of beliefs in an effort to exorcise these fears. Then, with the development of science and the rise of intellectualism, mankind has tried to justify rationally these beliefs, hidden under the cloak of medicine and life sciences.

In other words, there are three levels inside us:

a core of fears, from which we have learned to protect ourselves by covering it with

a layer of beliefs, which make us feel safe (even though those fears have not disappeared), this layer being itself dissimulated under:

an intellectual varnish , a rational façade which give us the illusion of having transcended superstitions and beliefs, and which shelters us from our fears, keeping us barricaded behind intellectual knowledge.

Fears and childish hopes are still manipulating us. We are still told that the source of our problems is outside of us, and that the solution can only come from the outside, as well. We are not allowed to do anything by ourselves and we must have the mediation of physicians-priests, the administration of drugshosts, and the protection of vaccines-baptism.

I though that was of particularly interesting given the current situation with the swine flu vaccine.

October 29, 2009

Dr. Diane Harper, lead researcher in the development of two human papilloma virus vaccines, Gardasil and Cervarix, said the controversial drugs will do little to reduce cervical cancer rates and, even though they’re being recommended for girls as young as nine, there have been no efficacy trials in children under the age of 15.

Dr. Harper, director of the Gynecologic Cancer Prevention Research Group at the University of Missouri, made these remarks during an address at the 4th International Public Conference on Vaccination which took place in Reston, Virginia on Oct. 2-4. Although her talk was intended to promote the vaccine, participants said they came away convinced the vaccine should not be received.

“I came away from the talk with the perception that the risk of adverse side effects is so much greater than the risk of cervical cancer, I couldn’t help but question why we need the vaccine at all,” said Joan Robinson, Assistant Editor at the Population Research Institute.

Dr. Harper began her remarks by explaining that 70 percent of all HPV infections resolve themselves without treatment within a year. Within two years, the number climbs to 90 percent. Of the remaining 10 percent of HPV infections, only half will develop into cervical cancer, which leaves little need for the vaccine.

She went on to surprise the audience by stating that the incidence of cervical cancer in the U.S. is already so low that “even if we get the vaccine and continue PAP screening, we will not lower the rate of cervical cancer in the US.”

There will be no decrease in cervical cancer until at least 70 percent of the population is vaccinated, and even then, the decrease will be minimal.

Apparently, conventional treatment and preventative measures are already cutting the cervical cancer rate by four percent a year. At this rate, in 60 years, there will be a 91.4 percent decline just with current treatment. Even if 70 percent of women get the shot and required boosters over the same time period, which is highly unlikely, Harper says Gardasil still could not claim to do as much as traditional care is already doing.

Dr. Harper, who also serves as a consultant to the World Health Organization, further undercut the case for mass vaccination by saying that “four out of five women with cervical cancer are in developing countries.”

Ms. Robinson said she could not help but wonder, “If this is the case, then why vaccinate at all? But from the murmurs of the doctors in the audience, it was apparent that the same thought was occurring to them.”

However, at this point, Dr. Harper dropped an even bigger bombshell on the audience when she announced that, “There have been no efficacy trials in girls under 15 years.”

Merck, the manufacturer of Gardasil, studied only a small group of girls under 16 who had been vaccinated, but did not follow them long enough to conclude sufficient presence of effective HPV antibodies.

This is not the first time Dr. Harper revealed the fact that Merck never tested Gardasil for safety in young girls. During a 2007 interview with KPC News.com, she said giving the vaccine to girls as young as 11 years-old “is a great big public health experiment.”

At the time, which was at the height of Merck’s controversial drive to have the vaccine mandated in schools, Dr. Harper remained steadfastly opposed to the idea and said she had been trying for months to convince major television and print media about her concerns, “but no one will print it.”

“It is silly to mandate vaccination of 11 to 12 year old girls,” she said at the time. “There also is not enough evidence gathered on side effects to know that safety is not an issue.”

When asked why she was speaking out, she said: “I want to be able to sleep with myself when I go to bed at night.” Since the drug’s introduction in 2006, the public has been learning many of these facts the hard way. To date, 15,037 girls have officially reported adverse side effects from Gardasil to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). These adverse reactions include Guilliane Barre, lupus, seizures, paralysis, blood clots, brain inflammation and many others. The CDC acknowledges that there have been 44 reported deaths.

Dr. Harper also participated in the research on Glaxo-Smith-Kline’s version of the drug, Cervarix, currently in use in the UK but not yet approved here. Since the government began administering the vaccine to school-aged girls last year, more than 2,000 patients reported some kind of adverse reaction including nausea, dizziness, blurred vision, convulsions, seizures and hyperventilation. Several reported multiple reactions, with 4,602 suspected side-effects recorded in total. The most tragic case involved a 14 year-old girl who dropped dead in the corridor of her school an hour after receiving the vaccination.

The outspoken researcher also weighed in last month on a report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that raised questions about the safety of the vaccine, saying bluntly: “The rate of serious adverse events is greater than the incidence rate of cervical cancer.”

Ms. Robinson said she respects Dr. Harper’s candor. “I think she’s a scientist, a researcher, and she’s genuine enough a scientist to be open about the risks. I respect that in her.”

However, she failed to make the case for Gardasil. “For me, it was hard to resist the conclusion that Gardasil does almost nothing for the health of American women.”

The news is slowly creeping out.

When they were offering vaccinations at my daughter’s school I hunted out the Australian data on cervical cancer from government sources. I was shocked at the extremely low incidence and rate of death from the cancer. It seemed absurd, on that fact alone, to progressively vaccinate the entire female population – with as yet unqualified risks – against a disease they were highly unlikely to contract. (I don’t have the figures on hand right now but, time permitting, will hunt them out and add them to this post. Failing that please do a search yourself. You’ll be quite shocked.)

October 27, 2009

Thimerosal (or thiomersal) is a mercury-based preservative used in vaccines, consisting of approximately 50% mercury. It has been removed from many of the childhood vaccines but is still used in flu shots, which will be given to all adults including pregnant women. Medical authorities persist in claiming mercury in vaccines is safe, despite evidence to the contrary. (Take a look at Dr Ayoub’s videos as a basic introduction and I’ll gradually provide other links over the coming weeks).

Thimerosal is listed as one of the ingredients in CSL’s swine flu vaccine (the suppliers of the vaccine in Australia) and also in the vaccines produced by other pharmaceutical companies for supply worldwide.

Mercury is also present in fish and amalgam fillings.

We are assured each of these exposures is safe but take a look at this clip to understand how mercury produces brain damage even at very low levels.

CSL’s product information sheet for Panvax states there are 50 micrograms of thimerosal in each dose. To give you some idea of the relative toxicity of that dosage take a look at one of the slides from Dr Ayoub’s presentation:

Remembering that thimerosal comprises approximately 50% mercury we can see that Panvax’s 50 mcg dose would contain about 25 mcg of mercury as per the above example.

In water two parts mercury per billion renders it unsafe to drink. Toxic waste is considered 200 parts per billion. Yet fish is deemed safe to consume around the 1000 ppb mark. And vaccines dwarf other exposures with a whooping 50,000 parts per billion! As Dr Ayoub say’s if the doctor dropped the vaccine on the floor it would be considered toxic waste yet we see fit to inject it into the human body.

CSL is currently testing a swine flu vaccine for children under 10 that will not contain thimerosal. Which begs the obvious question: if mercury in vaccines is so safe then why is there any need to produce a thimerosal-free vaccine for children?